Making his first public address – investors apart – since being confirmed as chief executive and managing director of Fairfax Media, Greg Hywood showed he could be the champion the Australasian media group needs to lift it out of the doldrums (writes Peter Coleman).

“We believe we have an understanding of what is driving people online,” he says. “The key is high quality premium content.”

Hywood says Fairfax’s transaction businesses are “more than thriving”, this its digital division will soon be the company’s second-largest earner

Commentators were quite to note a more aggressive leader than his predecessor Brian McCarthy had been. Talking about the “largely unacknowledged truth” of Fairfax’s digital transformation, he said digital has been elevated right up the food chain.

“The virus is spreading right through the company,” he said.

With more than a million downloads of iPhone and iPad apps, Fairfax also had twice as much traffic from mobile devices as rival News Limited… 200 websites reaching more than 22 million unique browsers.

Nielsen figures for January, based on publishers’ data, say Fairfax had 160,493 daily unique mobile browsers compared to News Limited’s 85,581 and ninemsn’s 51,507.

The address – at the start of this week’s DigitalDirections11 conference, organised by Fairfax with XMediaLabs – also showed signs of a more wistful and emotional leader.

Hywood talked of Fairfax as a creative company: “What we do is art, not merely value-added… making giant leaps where science meets art,” he said.

Hints of a more emotional side came when he slowed his speaking pace to discuss the publisher’s public responsibility and commitment to a free press, and contribution to public good in almost hushed tones.

“He does that,” a senior Fairfax executive told me afterwards.

The reaction was generally good, not just with the faithful, but external commentators: “We’ve finally got a champion, someone who can stand up for Fairfax in the same way (News Limited chairman John) Hartigan does,” my confidant told me.

There are issues however, with the statement that Fairfax is not a technology company: “We are a creative company… we want technology companies to partner with us,” he said.

“I realise the word ‘art’ is not often heard in business circles, but in this new world we’re going to hear more of it.”

Whether it’s possible to beat the Hartigan (and Murdoch) teams with just fine rhetoric and without differentiating yourself through the development of at least some inhouse technology, remains to be seen.

But in terms of the passion the group’s leadership sorely needs, it’s a promising start.